That’s not to say we won’t be entertained by stories about Facebook, Hi5 and the like as the masses rotate through the latest fashionable destinations for virtual sociability. We are also going to enjoy the spectacle of the battle between
Microsoft
and
Google
as the two corporate titans fight to the death over who owns our PCs’ activity. Will “do no evil” Google beat the Seattle Death Star? Will Microsoft merge with
Yahoo!
in the same way that a shark merges with a surfer? All will be revealed in the next year or so.

However, in the background, the force that has driven the computing format’s exponential growth is grinding to a halt. We’ve become accustomed to this trend over the last 25 years, but it looks like the end of the road is arriving. This is classically a wrong prediction to make, but for me this is not coming from an evaluation of transistors per micron or wafer sizes, but from the observation that after two years I still can’t buy a faster more powerful notebook than the one I’ve owned since 2006. Moore’s Law simply hasn’t been in evidence, at least not at the notebook level. The subsequent improvements available to me as a computer user don’t seem to deliver anything better at all. Ten years ago this would have been inconceivable. Likewise, I haven’t surfed an epiphanal Web site since I saw MySpace so long ago that it only had 500,000 profiles. Evolution has supplanted revolution in both spheres.

It is easy to be bearish about computing; a mixture of technical bloat and technical limits has borne down on progress and we seem to be facing a hiatus. Something mind-bogglingly great could pop up tomorrow, but the chances are that the Internet and old-style computing are teetering on the brink of becoming passé. This may well be simply a function of the net crossing into the mainstream, which actually marks the dawn of the Internet turning into a money-spinning old-style industry. Sadly, the transition from latest thing to mature business is likely to see these companies consequentially lose their stellar stock ratings as the novelty of their business models wears off.

However, all is not lost; something new is on its way. Enter the robots.

Robots will be a very big thing, and soon. What holds them back is what stunts most technology: a walled-garden approach to their systems. Robots currently do what the designers want them to do and that’s it.

Gadgets and gimmicks and concept robots from huge corporations all presage the moment that open-architecture robots will catapult robotics out of its niche. As soon as the next generation of teen nerds can get their fingers into the brains of $200 ‘bots, robotics will be unleashed into the outward spiral of acceptance. The nerds will run with the technology and do for robotics what they did for computing in the 1970s and 1980s. Once the touch paper is lit, a new technology era will be born and soon enough a host of new companies will explode into the headlines with extravagant business models and unbelievable valuations. A new tech cycle will begin.

There is actually no technical barrier to start this wave. All that is required is the right marketing idea at the right moment. There have already been a series of near misses, from the Tandy Armatron years ago to Lego Mindstorms–a Lego set that combined electric motors and sensors with programmable Lego bricks.

The robots are on the rise in any event, from home-helper robots such as Roomba the roboticvacuum cleaner from
iRobot
and Electolux’s Trilobite 2.0 to robotic pets and adaptive robots, such as WowWee’s Robopet, Tiger Electronics‘ Furbies and the CeBIT-launched Zeno all the way through to the less cute arena of robotic weapons. Indeed, a recent report suggests that the U.S. alone will spend $4 billion by 2010 on unmanned systems. There are currently thought to be over 4,000 robots on active duty in Iraq.

This is not to say that some new kind of Web site won’t send the Internet back into revolution or that some new computer technology won’t reinstate Moore’s Law to be once again perceptible from a consumer point of view.

However, even without those developments, really useful personal robotics is just over the horizon, and this will create the sort of step change that will set the markets on fire. It’s not a question of “if,” only of “when.” Then market history will repeat itself once again. However, this time we’ll be ready for it from day one.